Activating Cross-border Brokerage

Using an original dataset of 4,183 former J-1 Visa holders from 81 countries—all of whom had worked in the U.S.—I examine how skilled return migrants, as cross-border brokers, transfer knowledge about organizational practices from abroad to their home countries. I hypothesize that returnees’ knowledge transfer success depends on their embeddedness in both their home- and host-country workplaces and develop and test theory about the organizational and cultural conditions that activate or suppress skilled returnees’ ability to broker knowledge across borders. Findings show that not only do host- and home-country embeddedness increase knowledge transfer success, but they also interact positively. At the organizational level, however, the presence of other returnees in a home-country workplace decreases the positive effect of a returnee’s host-country embeddedness, whereas the similarity of a returnee’s industry background to the home-country industry increases it. At the country level, high xenophobia in a given home country diminishes the positive effect of host-country embeddedness but increases the positive effect of home-country embeddedness. These findings inform an interpersonal perspective on knowledge transfer, contributing to work on brokerage, organizational learning, employee mobility, and the globalization of expert knowledge.